This is why VLCD starvation diet never works in the long run

The past few years a new popularity boom of VLCD -Very Low Calorie Diet- products has flooded the market. The trend is obvious: people are overweight and they want a quick fix! For those of you who are not familiar with VLCD some examples of products are soups, smoothies and bars from such as Nutrilett, Alevo, OptiFast, Modifast and many others. The whole concept is to cut back on calorie intake so hard that you basically starve your body and thereby use stored body fat as energy source. With most of the VLCD products this is done by replacing your food with a smoothie, a soup, a powder shake or whatever product, 3-5 times a day every day until you’re slim.

Sounds easy enough! The problem is that there is no such thing as a quick fix or an easy way out! If there were then everyone would do it and everyone would look as Nick Auger in the picture above. I’m going to talk a bit about why VLCD diets never work in the long run and why I do not recommend it.

First of all, regardless of anything else, Very Low Calorie Diets are a torture and will be very mentally stressful. Some days you will be sitting on the edge of sanity and dangling your legs. Even if you pass that, you will be physically exhausted most of the time. Different VLCD products and programs will be differently aggressive. I have seen extreme examples where you drink a 100KCAL shake 5 times a day. That’s 500 KCAL a day! Compared that to about 2600KCAL for a normal weight man, or 3500KCAL for what a male athlete would eat in a day.

VLCD will work surprisingly well a short period of time for a person that is very overweight but will not show much result on someone that is almost normal weight and only has a few extra pounds. What happens the first period of time, may this be 2 weeks or 2 months depending on your weight, is that your body will slowly start to use and spend the body fat as an energy reserve, because you are technically starving now. Your body will reduce in body fat to dig up the energy that is needed for you to keep going and to survive. During this period the weight loss for a very overweight person may be somewhere between 1-5 kg (2-10 pounds) per week depending on the aggressiveness of the VLCD program.

Now, this is what they don’t tell you, the catch of VLCD and why it doesn’t work in the long run. Eventually your body is going to realize that it is starving and that there is not going to be more food anytime soon. Your body will go into a survival state and may drastically slow down your metabolism. Now instead of using body fat as energy reserve to keep you going, your body will instead try to spend as little energy as possible to “save you” from starving. It will slow down on using body fat as energy and may even start to break down some muscle mass. Muscles also provide a good energy reserve, but they are also spending valuable energy. Now the metabolism is at its slowest and instead of spending body fat your body will try to store new fat and break down muscles in order to survive. That means that some of the weight you lose now is actually muscle mass.

In addition to this, very long periods of VLCD may cause permanent and unrecoverable damage to your kidneys and liver. Once you try to start eating normal food again your body will still be in survival state for a period of time, maybe even for as long as it took to get into survival state. Because your body still being in the survival mode it will start storing fat right away and try to keep an energy reserve to save you from starving next time. This phenomenon has for ages been called yo-yo dieting. Once the yo-yo gets going, well…

To finish this up, if you plan to lose some weight there are much more fun and effective ways to do that. You don’t have to starve if you eat the right food and if you find an exercise form that fits your lifestyle.

5 Comments

Do you have anything to back up your statement of damaging your kidneys and liver? I’m pretty sure that’s wrong and I know I have read a reasearch report about starving diets stating the same thing.

There is a very logical reason to that as well. How our bodies react to a diet is based on an evolution for thousands of years. It’s not that many decades that we have actually had enough food not to starve during bad times (such as a long and hard winter etc.). Our bodies does not expect to have food all the time, otherwise it would not store any fat at all? Or not much at least… Starving is a very common thing to a human body. Most humans will enter a state called Ketosis when they starve – a state releasing ketone bodies in the blood which will make you mentally strong for a period of time. This is not a rush for a couple of hours, but for several days.

This also makes sense since a person who starve should not feel mentally or physically weak because how else should he be able to find new food? You will need to be able to perform if you want to be able to get more food. The rush will eventually end but you will NEVER feel weak. You will however not have the same endurance that you would normally have – but that is an effect of less energy to provide the muscles and it takes time to release energy from stored fat so you will need a longer rest to be able to perform physically again.

You are right about the metabolism and the yo-yo effect. That is the problem with basically all diets to lose weight quickly. The only way not to get a worse metabolism is to actually train insanly and just east slightly less, which most normal people are not ready to do. But you will only lose about 30-35% of your normal metabolism on a diet that starves the body. The body still need to work and it needs to use energy for that. But you can avoid the yo-yo effect by starting to train more while you increase the daily intake of energy. That will solve the problem after a couple of months.

There is nothing wrong with VLCD but it’s not a diet for those who wants to lose 5-10 pounds, or even 20 pounds for that matter. But if you have 50 pounds, or even 100 pounds too much, then VLCD is a great diet if you are aware of back side and tackle it once you are done.

First of all I want to thank you for making such an elaborate post comment, it’s very appreciated.

You are right, I do not have any medical proof supporting that VLCD may cause organ damages, however many studies regarding long-term malnutrition show this. I am basically relying on other reports that I read.

Ketosis state does not happen because of starvation or VLCD-diet, ketosis state only happens during extremely low or total lack of carbohydrates. VLCD are low calorie diet and not low carbohydrate diet. You may very well never enter ketosis state while on VLCD if carbohydrate supply is sufficient. Ketosis is often the key in other diets such as LCHF (Low Carbs High Fat) where calorie count is not as important as carb and fat count is. In LCHF you can enter ketosis state even on 2000 KCAL.

A starvation diet can be easily referred as a diet in which you are starving yourself. Starving to lose weight is not recommended at all. You must be aware of the fact that if you skip meal, then your body will hold more of the next meal and your metabolism will start slowing down even if your next meal is a small one. This method of losing weight is very unhealthy. You may end up becoming anorexia. It’s okay if you skip one meal once in a short time. But if you try to starve, you will then feel hungry because your body is in search of food to keep it going.

I am the perfect example of why a VLCD is detrimental to a person of normal body weight or considered “overweight.” I put myself on a VLCD diet already when I was an overweight 10 year old. I was able to somehow magnificintly continue this way being involved in 3 school sports as well as summer sports. It wasn’t until I was sixteen and finally started menustrating that I freaked out and finally lost everything including all of my body weight, thus ability to participate in sports. I was obviously anorexic (5″6.5′ and of at least a medium frame) at 72 lbs. I decided to start eating again and quickly ballooned to 160 lbs, and turned to a VLCD again to correct my problems. It wasn’t working to lose or starve this way anymore so I turned to bulimia. It was not so prominent in the first 3 years, but in total I was bulimic for 8 years. I decided this could no longer fit my lifestyle and was very unhealthy–I needed to stop. I started eating healthy again, gained weight quickly and became very scared–back to the VLCD (GO FIGURE). On top of the VLCD’s all these years I have also been an active person as well as a runner. Here I am at 26 years of age and decided a couple of months ago that I absolutely need to start eating healthy. I have been. I majored in Dietetics in college so I know what it takes. I don’t remember being this big again for quite some time. Still for as few calories as I eat I think I have quite a bit of weight on me. It is a nightmare that makes me think I am doing wrong for eating well. Please do not ever resort to a VLCD unless you are extremely obese. People also need to understand that we all are different and that certain people are built to be larger than others. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. At age 17, 5″6.5′ and 130 lbs I was lightheaded constantly trying to keep my weight that low. If you look at the charts for women at that height, that is a fairly normal weight. Not for me. I hope you know what I am getting at.